About Me

  ‘I started writing in my teens. After completing one novel and beginning a second I came to realise they would never be published – so I consigned reams of paper to the attic and got on with real life.

It was a sense of fair play that started me again. I’d been researching the British Cavalry of the Georgian and Regency periods (don’t ask – it’s a long story) and found that not one historian had a good word to say about them.

I read more and more, continually meeting the same old ‘galloping at everything’ attitude to horsemen – no -one seemed to have put the all the circumstances of so-called ‘cavalry disasters’ under a microscope.

Someone needed to write about how the British cavalry who fought against Napoleon really lived – and died. How they survived, in times of peace and war. How they saw what their commanders viewed as ‘disasters’. And how they celebrated their triumphs. It’d make a good novel, I thought.

So I started a story based on the lives of two of these men.  And I’m still writing it.’

Jonathan Hopkins lives and works in the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales. A keen rider, having done a variety of jobs he has spent the last twelve years as a professional saddle fitter and is Chairman of a BHS affiliated Riding Club.

In November 2010 he gave a lecture to the Napoleonic Association Annual Conference entitled ‘Researching and Writing a Historical Novel.’

Walls of Jericho, his first cavalry novel, was published in 2008. A sequel, Leopardkill, will be launched in September 2013 by Bretwalda Books and there are further stories in the pipeline.

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